SATURDAY, MAY 8—LINCOLN PRAIRIE
It was just past sunrise when Thomas Newsome awakened. Rain tapped against the windows but there was no wind, and now the rainfall was not enough to make the river keep rising. Not that he could see the river from here. Nor did he want to. He could remember other floods. Each time they said this one was worse, but he wasn’t sure about that. He remembered Gurnee when it was still a town, with farms and barns and acres of soybeans and corn; even a few cows and sheep and goats. Now there were just acres of stores and restaurants. He didn’t go there anymore. He didn’t go anywhere except to the doctor’s office. Nothing was like it used to be, but knowing that wasn’t as difficult to get used to as disliking what everything had become.
He was dozing off when Harriet brought his breakfast. Back when they had full-time help, there would have been a knock first, but Harriet, his daughter-in-law, just barged in, just like she had barged into his son’s life, rear-ending his car back when the roads around here had two lanes. Now, with his wife dead and his son dead, there was just the two of them. Unlike him, Harriet was still in good health. It had been a terrible thing, burying his son. Too bad it hadn’t been her. He was certain she would outlive him. And, she was so damned cheerful all the time it was annoying.
“Come on, Dad,” Harriet said. He hated it when she called him that. “I know you’re not asleep. Here you are.”
He heard the tray hit the table but didn’t open his eyes.
“Fresh-squeezed orange juice, your egg soft-boiled, and your oatmeal just the way you like it, and guess what, I warmed up a little applesauce as well.”
She did take good care of him, Thomas admitted. If only he liked her. But he did not. There wasn’t any particular reason why he didn’t, at least not that he could think of. Maybe it was because she had not only failed to produce any grandchildren, but outlived his son as well. None of that could be undone, so therefore none of it mattered, but he didn’t have to accept any of it and “go on.” What did that mean, go on? Keep breathing? When your only son died, you didn’t just go on; part of you died with him.
After he had eaten and Harriet had barged in again and removed his tray he got up, showered, and dressed. He was reading all of Dickens again and particularly enjoying Bleak House.Perhaps enjoying wasn’t quite the right word. The story spoke to how he had begun to feel about his own life in the years since Tom died.
He tried not to think of Tom’s death as a punishment, but it was. There were so many wrongs, those of his father, those of his son, and his.
Come Memorial Day he would make his annual pilgrimage to the family plot. There would be six of them buried there eventually. His parents, his wife, and his son were there now. One day, perhaps soon, he would join them. He rather suspected that Harriet would live forever.
His oldest brother had not survived the Normandy invasion and was buried in France. Then there was Edmund, his younger brother. Nobody knew what had become of him. Edmund’s disappearance was as much a puzzle as the way his father had died—in a storm while moving a downed wire. Why would his father have gotten out of the car and touched it? His father would not have even been on that road that night, were it not for him.
Edmund and Dad. Why was it that his sins of omission hung more heavily on his soul than those he had committed? The road not taken. The things left undone. The words not spoken. The feelings never revealed. And now there would only be a priest to confess to, a priest to forgive him. What wouldn’t he give to have Edmund and Dad here, to have just one more look at them, and just one brief moment to talk?
Thomas opened the cupboard where he kept the Theotokos. He looked at the pain in that mother’s face. Over the years, he had come to believe her pain was far greater than his own and to find some comfort in that. But now he wanted peace, forgiveness, both harder to come by. He opened a drawer, took out a page from Monday’s Chicago Tribune, and put it on the table beside his worn leather copy of Dickens. Then he opened another drawer and took out a wooden chest about the size of one that his mother’s silver table service was kept in.
This chest had a hinged top and was made of oak with elaborate scrollwork on the sides. Within the latticed edges of the top the twelve apostles stood, each with his own symbol, each stern-faced with the hard, steady gaze of one who judges. The Theotokos sat in the center, holding her child. This mother was serene. Above the heads of the carved figures the risen Christ ascended. Angels, blowing into long wooden balciums and playing stringed gardons, rushed to greet Him.
Thomas opened the chest and took out the manuscript attributed to Eugene Ionesco. The jewelry was at the bottom of the box. Heavy silver and gold pieces, most with zirconia. And the cuff links. He reached out to touch them, then drew his hand back as if they were hot and would burn him. It was only their secret that hurt now. He imagined his father standing in the road, reaching down to pick up a live wire. The cuff links were the cause of it. He didn’t know what had happened that night, but even if it was divine retribution, the cuff links were the cause of it all.
Neither the box nor what was kept inside belonged to him. Nor was the icon of the Theotokos his to look at every morning and pray to at night. They were just something else to atone for.
Soon he would remedy that, even though they were not that valuable or of any importance. The patriarch was coming. He would arrange to return all of this to him and make his confession. Then, if his rest in the next world was still not assured, perhaps as he waited to take his place in the family plot, he could, at last, find peace.
Thomas Newsome was asleep in the chair by the window when she returned to his room. His book was on the floor where it must have fallen. Sometimes he just pretended to be asleep, but now he was sitting with his chin on his chest and his mouth half-open, drooling. He caught his breath for a moment, mid- snore. She stood still and waited, just in case this time the strangling sound meant he was taking his last breath. He hesitated, then exhaled.
The thick carpet muffled her footsteps as she walked to the built-in cupboard. She opened the door, pulled out the bottom drawer, and opened the chest without removing it. She took a quick look at the old man, then returned the manuscript page. She had taken it to the museum curator yesterday. Without doing whatever tests they could do to authenticate it, or translating it from Romanian or French to English, he had been quick to tell her he could sell it. He had quoted her a price that she suspected was half what he could get for it, but she accepted. It was more than she expected.
He shrugged when she showed him a piece of the jewelry and asked about a price. “Not that much,” he told her. She knew from the expression in his eyes and the way he held it in his hand a moment longer than was necessary that he was lying. She would have to find out more about the jewelry before she made arrangements to sell it. She would have to find out very soon.
She didn’t think the old man was getting senile. He had been living in the past ever since Tom died. Then again, she had not >expected Tom to die of a heart attack at thirty-eight either. The old man could just drop dead on her, too.
Now there was that newspaper clipping he kept in the cupboard. His Beatitude Vladimir, patriarch of Budapest, was coming to visit a Romanian Orthodox Church in Skokie. Thomas New- some, who had attended Presbyterian services on those few occasions when he went to church at all, now had a sudden interest in the church of his ancestors. She had called to see if this Vladimir would be leading any liturgical services and written down the time and date, 11 a.m. next Sunday, the sixteenth.
Her mother had “made her peace with God” and died in her sleep four days later. She wasn’t much older then than the old man was now. With that in mind, she was going to suggest that the old man go to this Vladimir’s liturgy next Sunday. Maybe, like her mother, he, too, would make peace with his God and die. Then these treasures, which he didn’t even have the common sense to value, would be hers. She weighed a piece of the jewelry in her hand again. The sixteenth. Now that she had a plan, she would have to find out what this was worth and find a buyer as quickly as possible.